izigame.me

I was excited to play this game as I'm a major fan of the series that inspire it and I had wishlisted a while back, but unfortunately it has many issues that I can't see past. These are in no order of importance as I typed them while playing.
1. Very unusual physics. Sometimes a pot will break or other item will fall over and continue to bounce around for an inordinate amount of time, and often-times these objects will look as though they are running at a much lower frame rate. Enemies shatter strangely and pieces fly off all over without proper animation. Random items that seemingly serve no purpose (eg -pencil and tennis ball in the shrunk level) have physics but they do not react properly to collision.
2. Animations seem very glitchy/buggy at times-- some are being skipped on the character's model (when talking to Prof. Nancy TVs, for example), while enemy animations just look awful (you can see the lack of animations/weird jumpy animations in the trailers on this page, they have not been fixed since that was made).
3. The camera control is EXTREMELY slow (with a controller AND mouse), and the sensitivity can't be adjusted. When in tight quarters, the game controls the camera which results in some bad angles and a ton of clipping (eg - furnace duct in shrunk level).
4. Similarly, some of the actions are mapped to strange buttons, and these cannot be reassigned.
5. Sound is a little all over the place. In the first world (the bedroom), as I was fighting an enemy the level had two music tracks that kept switching as I dodged around, all while the robot enemy made a strange loud hissing sound. The songs themselves are...not very good. They are fairly short and sound like fair use tracks. The way the audio comes together, it sounds like I'm listening to a music playlist while playing the game on mute. All NPC/enemies make one or two noises and repeat them over. And over. And over.
6. Graphically, the characters are mostly fine (the enemies look awful), but the environments are filled with the same repeated assets over and over again. Red shoe, random glitchy pot to smack (the pots are this game's crates from Ratchet & Clank, but look very out of place), onion rings, soup cans, coffee mugs-- all strewn about the level just to fill space. Like seriously, why are there 6 bags of onion rings in every room?
7. For whatever reason, after I viewed a tip screen that showed me a "puzzle" with a toaster in the first level, that image of the toaster would continue to just randomly pop up every few minutes for the remainder of the level (replacing what was actually happening)
8. Very unusual and long loading screens. When I would leave the first level, it would cut to three or four different scenes of loading screen (all cut together strangely) before finally showing my destination. The process probably takes 12 seconds on an NVME SSD, can't imagine what it's like on an HDD.
7. Hopefully others are better, but the first level is a bit of a slog. It's large with lots of space between anything important, like the whopping 400 tokens you have to collect to get to the next level. Nothing particularly fun or unique about the level; it's a much worse Andy's House from the Toy Story 2 video game.
8. Another sound point-- there are so many little tip TVs in the game and they all make an annoying ringing/chirping, even after you've viewed them. At one point in the first level there are three within earshot of the character all going at the same time. The more I walked around, the more I realized I was hearing this ringing over half the time I was playing.
9. In the first level, you unlock two extra paths by pressing buttons after some platforming. If you leave and re-enter the level, you have to re-do this every time. This is made worse by the fact that the level is broken up into 3 parts that require some backtracking to get between, and the 3rd part also includes what I thought would be a teleporter back to the beginning...but instead takes you to the hub world and you have to re-enter the level to finish it.
10. This is random, but there's a record player in the first level-- I was in the level on two separate occasions: During the first, if I ran in the direction the record was turning, my character was slow, but was normal speed running against the rotation. The next time I was in the level, running both directions made me slow. Weird-- but why even put the record player in if you aren't going to use it for something or even get it right.
11. When grabbing one of the collectible keys, there's a little cutscene (the key dances around you or something). When I collected one, as my character stood there for the cutscene, an enemy came into the frame of the cut scene, pushed my character out, and I died (I could not control anything during this of course).

I really wanted to like this game, and as I started typing this I intended to just give a few technical comments and give some praise for the things it does well. The more I played, the more I realized the game in its current state is just bad. Aside from the multitude of technical issues I noted, the gameplay was just not fun and the layout of the level and forced backtracking was awful. The other levels in the trailer look like they could be cool, but unfortunately I can't stomach the rest of the first level to see. From what I saw, this feels like a pre-early-access game that got rushed out the door and I can't recommend it even to the most diehard platformer fans.
Edit: I popped back in and tried the second level after realizing I had unlocked it (either I'm oblivious or it's not as obvious as it should be that you walk into the grey wall of "mist" at the train station to enter it). Unfortunately, much of the same in this level. Very large with very little going on, terrible animations-- notably the horse carriage flying around the level at <20 fps, just not fun unfortunately. There's so much empty space that exists only to house pocket watch collectibles, making the world feel empty and much of the level feel pointless.
Also this may not be the right place to say this, but it's pretty telling that many of the positive reviews I've seen here and elsewhere mention knowing the developer and praising him for doing this all on his own. Some of these reviews (like the one who mentions he did a voice for one of the characters) blindly rave about the game, when it is CLEAR there are blatant problems. For as many people seemingly tested this, there must have been either an unwillingness from testers to provide constructive criticism to a friend or a failure on the dev's part to accept criticism or solicit help for the project. I hope the feedback in reviews helps get the game to a better place, but from a level design and gameplay perspective the game needs major rework, regardless of the pricepoint of the game.